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The Amnesia of the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment

“Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based
international order.” The Economist’s
headline last summer summarized a common refrain within
America’s foreign policy establishment. Trump “wants to
undo the liberal international order the United States
built,” Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution warned on Inauguration Day in 2017. Trump could
“bring to an end the United States’ role as guarantor
of the liberal world order,” Princeton professor G. John
Ikenberry wrote.

Trump is certainly hostile to what he sometimes refers to as
“globalism”: multilateralism, free trade agreements,
international institutions, and any international legal regime that
could impose constraints on U.S. power. He is antagonistic toward
allies and treaties, withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate
agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Iran nuclear
deal, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the UN
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the
UN Human Rights Council.

But those excoriating Trump for his disregard for rules and
norms rarely mention similar, routine violations of this
rules-based order by his predecessors. And while the foreign policy
establishment is firm in its condemnation of Trump’s
“turning away from global engagement,” as Richard Haass
of the Council on Foreign Relations put it, their harshest criticisms seem reserved
for those few sporadic instances in which Trump tries to jettison lengthy and failed military
deployments, as in Syria and Afghanistan, or expresses
insufficiententhusiasm for
permanent overseas garrisons.

President Trump is not
the first president to weaken the international liberal
order.

The pundits, practitioners, and politicians that make up the
foreign policy establishment have rarely respected the
non-interventionist principles at the core of the United Nations,
an institution exemplifying the liberal rules-based international
order that the United States helped establish following World War
II. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter says “All Members shall
refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of
force against the territorial integrity or political independence
of any state…” According to the Charter, which American
post-war planners helped write, the use of force is illegal and
illegitimate unless at least one of two prerequisites are met:
first, that force is used in self-defense; second, that the UN
Security Council authorizes it.

This prohibition against war is not some trivial aspiration.
Non-intervention is the centerpiece of international law and the
United Nations has repeatedly sought to underline its significance.
In 1965, the General Assembly declared “No state or group of states has the
right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason
whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any state.”
Again in 1970, it unanimously reaffirmedthe illegality of “armed intervention
and all other forms of interference or attempted threats.” In
1981, the General Assembly further specified that the Charter’s
“principle of non-intervention and non-interference”
prohibited “any … form of intervention and interference,
overt or covert, directed at another State or group of States, or
any act of military, political or economic interference in the
internal affairs of another State.”

The United States is currently engaged in active military
hostilities in at least seven countries, namely Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. That tally doesn’t include drone strikes in Pakistan, combat operations in
Kenya, Cameroon, and Central African Republic, or other
interventions of unknown magnitude. The true number might be closer
to 14 countries. The White House is also explicitly threatening U.S. military action to
change the regime in Venezuela and againstIran for a host of spurious reasons. Not one of
these cases meets the prerequisites for legal military intervention
(a plausible self-defense case can be made for the war in
Afghanistan, but it expired a long time ago).

No other state in the international system uses force
more than the U.S. has. Throughout the
Cold War, the United States used military means to interfere in
other countries about twice as often as did the Soviet Union.
This doesn’t include interventions below the threshold of
military action: from 1946 to 2000, Washington meddled in foreign
elections more than 80 times (compared to 36 by the
Soviet Union or Russia over the same period). Covert operations to
overthrow democratically elected governments, as in Iran,
Guatemala, and Chile, were a stapleof U.S. conduct in this period,
and according to the Rand Corporation, “the number and scale of U.S.
military interventions rose rapidly in the aftermath of the Cold
War.” The Congressional Research Service lists more than
200 individual U.S. military interventions from 1989 to 2018, a
rate that no other country even comes close to matching.

It’s hard for America to act as the guarantor of a
rules-based order that it consistently violates. When President
Obama condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea
in 2014, saying international law prohibits redrawing territorial
borders “at the barrel of a gun,” it was somewhat
awkward: The United States did exactly that in the 1999 Kosovo war,
which lacked Security Council approval, and successive
administrations have similarly supported Israel as it annexes and
occupies territory in violation of international law. Secretary of
State John Kerry castigated Russia’s territorial grab
this way: “You just don’t in the
21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another
country on completely trumped up pretext.” As it happens,
that’s a rather apt description of the Bush
administration’s brazenly illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Washington often appeals to international law to justify
military action against despots who commit atrocities, as it did
when it secured UN Security Council approval in 2011 to bomb Libya.
But even there, when the initial use of force was authorized, the
Obama administration rapidly exceeded the mandate of the resolution
by pursuing what amounted to a regime-change strategy. And such
appeals to humanitarianism are highly selective: U.S. military
power has also been used to assist Saudi Arabia, one of the
world’s most regressive authoritarian regimes, commit war
crimes and keep an impoverished and largely defenseless population
in Yemen under siege.

America’s delinquency isn’t restricted to the use of
force. Though 139 other countries have done so, Washington has
refused to sign on to the Rome Statute, which established the
International Criminal Court. And although the United States has
badgered China for violating the UN Convention on the Law of the
Sea, which defines maritime rights and responsibilities, the U.S.
refuses to ratify the treaty itself. For all the talk of
China’s unfair trade practices, the only country that
receives more formal complaints about WTO violations than China
is the United States—and China does a better job of complying once complaints
are made.

The political establishment in Washington has always accepted
this unique role for the United States. We’re the policeman
of the world. We enforce the rules and therefore assert the right
to violate them, even as we (often violently) deny others that same
prerogative.

Any claim to special privileges rests to some extent on
whether the international community sees it as
legitimate.The problem is that America’s increasing disregard
for the rules has undermined its legitimacy and that of the order
itself: More than any other single nation, its actions determine
the basis of international norms. As U.S. foreign policy becomes
more transparently lawless, the power of international law to
constrain state behavior weakens accordingly. To legitimize the
Russian annexation of Crimea, President Vladimir Putin actually
citedthe “Kosovo precedent.” In
2016, Chinese officials dismissed U.S. criticisms of
Beijing’s human rights record by citing the
“notorious…prison abuse at Guantanamo.” The United
States, Chinese diplomat Fu Cong told the UN Council on Human Rights,
“conducts large-scale extra-territorial eavesdropping, uses
drones to attack other countries’ innocent civilians, its
troops on foreign soil commit rape and murder of local people. It
conducts kidnapping overseas and uses black prisons.” And
when American officials lambaste Iran for backing the Syrian regime
of Bashar al-Assad despite his use of chemical weapons, Iranian
officials frequently remind the world that the United States
aided Saddam Hussein while he deployed chemical
weapons on a much larger scale.

Our hypocrisy has always been a threat to our legitimacy, but in
the past it was often managed with careful rhetoric and diplomatic
maneuvers designed to conceal the discrepancy between our words and
our deeds, to camouflage our violations in language that reinforced
the order or appealed to higher values. Trump is distinct from his
predecessors not because his foreign policy is a radical departure,
but because he is carrying out similar policies without the
moralistic righteousness of his predecessors .

Saving the liberal order means adhering to the UN
Charter’s prohibition on the use of force except in
self-defense or unless authorized by the Security Council. It means
rolling back our global military footprint and adopting a more
restrained foreign policy that at least approximates the manner in
which we expect other nations to behave. It means recognizing that
the United States is not exempt from the rules and norms it often
punishes others for transgressing, and it means acknowledging that
the foreign policy establishment has done at least as much damage
to the rules-based order as has President Trump.